Theme article
History of crime fiction
By: Johan Wopenka
Depending upon how one wishes to define the concept ‘crime fiction’, it is possible to trace its history and roots back in time. When Dorothy L. Sayers compiled her comprehensive three-volume anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928–34) she started with two stories from the Old Testament, and when Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (alias Ellery Queen) wrote their fundamental The Detective Short Story : A Bibliography (1942), they listed eight Chinese collections of short stories which are believed to have been written down between 600 A.D. and 1800 A.D., some of them containing stories based on an older, oral tradition.
Literary figure
Singer Batts
Gender: Male
He is an extremely reluctant amateur detective of early middle-age, the owner of a little private hotel in Preston, Ohio, and has an energetic hotel manager in Joe Spinder. This means that Singer Batts decandicate himself to his hobby – he is a passionate bibliophile – and to studying Shakespeare. He is – according to author Thomas B. Dewey – tall and extremely thin because he doesn’t like eating...